


Two Hunters

by Mynameisdoubleg



Category: BattleTech: MechWarrior, Classic Battletech (Tabletop RPG)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-05
Updated: 2021-03-05
Packaged: 2021-03-18 14:27:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,004
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29859462
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mynameisdoubleg/pseuds/Mynameisdoubleg
Summary: The Bounty Hunter is on the trail of a deadly killer who seems to have a grudge against the five great houses.





	Two Hunters

_Ruins of Edo City_

_Turtle Bay_

_Draconis Combine_

_7 May, 3067_

The hunters would not be far behind. He hoped not. He’d gone to a lot of effort, come a long way, just to make this last gesture.

Like most Combine cities, Edo had never been a great beauty, but was rather an architectural eyesore smeared across the mountain slopes, with tightly-packed and regimented rows of industrially hideous worker tenements, smoke-belching, water-fouling chemical and steel plants, and monolithically brutal government offices designed to cow the populace rather than inspire.

Yet it had been a city, once. No more.

No monuments marked Edo City’s grave, no wreaths were laid at its feet, no tearful poems adorned its gates. There were only interlocking, overlapping rubble-filled craters and the occasional splintered shard of building still standing upright. It had sat too long in its killer’s hands, an embarrassing reminder of their failure. Its new masters, the Combine, were unsure how to commemorate its passing—military dictatorships generally had misgivings about celebrating popular uprisings. And so it sat, or rather it gently and slowly fell, crumbling centimeter by centimeter, pulled inevitably down by gravity and indifference.

It had been leveled by orbital bombardment by Clan Smoke Jaguar in 3050, not long after the Clans’ return to the Inner Sphere. A conquered population had risen in fury against the occupiers, and then fire had fallen from the skies. Over a million died.

The MechWarrior walked his BattleMech slowly through the ruins, crushing rubble and debris and history into powder beneath its heavy tread. He settled the _Ebon Jaguar_ in the shade of one of the last remaining upright buildings, as close as he could get to the city’s center. Nothing to do but wait, and enjoy the scenery.

Flowers were growing, pushing up through the cracks in the shattered ground. With nature’s breathtaking disregard for irony, many were the local species of Verbena, a sultry purplish-grey flower the color of the Smoke Jaguar crest.

In the distance, he could see the mountain. Kurushiiyama they called it, with typical Combine gothic overenthusiasm. It was supposed to mean “Mount Pain,” but a closer translation was “Painful Mountain,” as though it had stubbed its foothills on the water table or banged its shoulders on the continental shelf. It had been home to a prison, and the prison briefly home to the Combine’s heir, and the Combine’s heir the cause of the riot that had resulted in the city’s annihilation. The prison had, in another injection of irony, survived. It was still up there. A painful reminder on its painful mountain seat.

The MechWarrior was distracted by the _Ebon Jaguar_ ’s battle computer, chiming to inform him of four approaching contacts. He rolled his neck, cracked his knuckles, flexed his fingers and settled them about the ’Mech’s controls.

The communications panel pinged for his attention almost the same moment he got a visual on the lead machine—a 75-ton _Timber Wolf_ , painted green from shoulder missile launchers to raptor-clawed feet, dotted here and there with a slashed C, the Inner Sphere symbol for C-Bills. The mark of the man known only as the Bounty Hunter.

The MechWarrior acknowledged the signal and opened a channel.

“Guess this completes the puzzle,” the voice on the other end said. It sounded flat and digitized, clearly processed through a voice scrambler.

“You put the pieces together,” the man in the _Ebon Jaguar_ acknowledged.

“Wasn’t easy. Didn’t see how they fit, at first.”

“Congratulations. It feels right, in a way, that it be you—it is, how shall I put it, symmetrical. You hunt the innocent for money; I persecute the guilty, for honor.”

“I make people pay for the things they’ve done. You kill ‘em for things that happened centuries ago.”

“Out of curiosity, which House hired you?”

There was a staticky chuckle at the other end. “Well, all of ‘em, of course.”

_Island of New Tierra del Fuego_

_Tall Trees_

_Saiph Triumvirate (Chaos March, former Capellan Confederation)_

_13 March, 3062_

The hazmat suit was bulky, hot, tight in all the wrong places, hopelessly baggy everywhere else, and the air inside smelled like a pair of gymnast’s underpants. You could barely see, barely walk, and after fifteen minutes barely breathe. When Sal found whatever had tripped the motion alarms, he was going to cheerfully murder it. If the hazmat suit didn’t kill him first.

He waddled through the forest, towards the tattered and rusted silhouette of what had once been called the Wisdom of Elias Liao Meteorological Observation Center, but was better known as ground zero for the worst plague to strike any world in this corner of the Inner Sphere in the last three centuries. Unbelievably fast and invariably fatal, the only symptom of the virus had been when its victims suddenly fell down stone dead. The island was quarantined, but not before its entire population had been wiped out. If anyone had wondered too loudly about the connection to the so-called ‘Meteorological Center’ or how a virus of such hideously efficient lethality had suddenly appeared among the population without warning, they had been paid a midnight visit from the Maskirovka, the state secret police, and one way or another the questions soon stopped.

Sal and a small team of scientists had monitored the island in the decades since, looking for signs of the disease incubating among the wildlife, waiting for the day people might return to the island. And now, something or someone big enough to trip one of the alarms at the Center had returned. Sal swallowed, and prayed it was a malfunction.

They’d given him a gun. A fat, stubby laser pistol, with an internal power pack good for about two or three shots. It wasn’t much comfort. Any animal big enough to trip the alarm was probably big enough to make a meal out of him. He could barely see out the helmet, and the ridiculous mittens the suit had for hands would make it hard to hit anything much smaller than a BattleMech. He hoped the bright yellow plastic of the suit made him look as unappetizing on the outside as it smelled on the inside.

Gravel crunched underfoot as he left the woods. The rusted bones of a razor wire fence creaked at him as he stomped past. A black and yellow biohazard warning flapped in the chill wind. Sal squinted through the faceshield. His breath whistled sharply in the confines of the suit, loud enough to activate his microphone.

“What is it?” asked Chief Scientist Greg Yue’s voice on the other end.

“The doors are open,” Sal said tightly, fumbling for the pistol. The plain and stout double doors that had been the Center’s main entrance had been forced inward. A black gap beckoned beyond. Faintly, Sal thought he could hear something creaking.

“Animals?” Yue wondered.

Sal squinted at the door mechanism. The metal lock had been melted and now ran in long, bubbled streaks down the front of the doors. The area around the lock was soot-stained, the door material curled and blackened.

“No,” Sal whispered. “Not animals.”

The pistol, the pistol, where was the damn pistol? Clumsy in his thick gloved fingers, the pistol slipped, clattered to the ground. Shatteringly loud against the whispered, moaning background noise. Sal froze. Waited. The noise continued. He hunched down, suit crinkling and crackling like a candy wrapper, tried to pick up the pistol, succeeded on the third attempt. Holding it out before him with both hands, he shuffled inside the doors.

The first thing he saw was a pair of feet. Dangling in the sliver of light from the doors. Sal’s eyes tracked upwards, from feet, to legs, body. Face. The hose of a gas mask wrapped as a noose about its neck.

Sal bent double and vomited, making his suit smell impossibly, indescribably worse.

_Pattersville_

_Demeter_

_Federated Commonwealth_

_12 October, 3062_

When the bleary, ragged and patently drunk man staggered into the police station with his wild story of abduction and escape, Chief Constable Asquith nodded in sympathy, had the man empty his pockets, then took him gently by the hand, led him down the corridor, took him to a nice little room with a nice, plain cot, then slammed the drunk tank door shut in his face.

“M’nut durnk,” the man slurred, leaning his forehead against the bars. Yellowed, glassy eyes fixated on something on the far wall. “Furking gave me summin. Talked funny. Yinnow? Or. Sumthin. Gave me, put in my. Something made me. Not drunk.”

“Of course not,” Asquith agreed pleasantly, soothingly, putting the keys back on his belt. “Somebody tricked you, right?”

“S’right, s’blud’dam’right.” The man was having trouble keeping upright, and flopped his entire body against the door, held up only by his elbows hooked around the door’s cross-bars. “Grey. Or purple. One of them. Up in whatsit. Place they. Did the. Yinnow? Got to. Call. Policemen.”

“Don’t worry,” Asquith reassured him. “I’ll get our finest officers right on the case of the grey or possibly purple man who is going around getting people drunk.”

Still shaking his head, Asquith strolled back to the duty station. “Let him sleep it off,” he sighed to himself. He exchanged smiles with the other officer on duty back at the desk. They chuckled. The other man went back to watching the news on the tri-D display.

Eccentric drunks were pretty much the peak of excitement at the precinct. Pattersville was a quiet, sleepy town, home to an aerospace manufacturing plant, placid neighborhoods of engineers, craftsmen and laborers, family-filled parks and playgrounds, and the planet’s most famous ice cream store.

Nothing notable had happened in the area for close 300 years, when a small nuclear device had destroyed an industrial complex. A few hundred had died. A border war had been fought. Ancient history, a small pebble of loss compared to the crushing landslide of death brought by the Succession Wars.

Asquith settled into his chair behind the desk. There was a cup of coffee, gone lukewarm now. He reflexively blew on it to cool it anyway, then felt foolish. He glanced sidelong at the other officer to see if he’d noticed. The other man was sitting bolt upright, staring at the tri-D screen. Asquith leaned over to see what had so surprised him. A news anchor was repeating a terse statement about a suspected kidnapping. A holo of the victim’s face appeared.

Asquith clapped a hand to his mouth in shock, dropping the coffee, splashing it across the desk, the floor, the trousers of his uniform. He didn’t notice. He sprang from his chair and raced back to the cell, fumbling for the keys, a stream of profuse and abject apologies clanging even louder than the metal door.

“Apologies, your Grace, your Highness, my Lord, I didn’t realize,” Asquith groveled. “Of course, a most heinous crime, yes, most serious. We’ll put our top men on it at once, I promise.”

Nathan Green-Davion, Count of the Golden Isles and distant relative of the ruling House Steiner-Davion, woozily found his feet, gave Asquith an imperious if somewhat unsteady glare, strode regally from the cell and straight into the opposite wall.

The next day, the Count fell mysteriously ill. He was rushed to hospital, where his condition rapidly deteriorated. His hair fell out, he bled from his nose, his mouth, his gums, sores appeared on his skin. Three weeks later, he was dead.

_Turtle Bay_

_7 May, 3067_

“Poor Green-Davion. Must’ve been something he drank.”

“A grain of radioactive polonium,” the _Ebon Jaguar_ MechWarrior explained. “Fatal dose is less than a microgram.”

“Killing a man with radiation on the site of an ancient A-Bomb? Must seem like poetic justice to you.”

The Bounty Hunter was playing for time, he realized, trying to keep him talking while the other three BattleMechs surrounded him, cut off any avenue of retreat. Foolish. If they’d followed him this far, if they’d thought about what he’d done, they should have realized he had no plans to escape.

“The guy on Tall Trees—Vasily Jordan,” the Bounty Hunter continued. “He didn’t seem to fit the pattern—until we made the connection to House Liao. His aunt was married to old Max Liao. You said you pursued the guilty, but this guy’s only crime was having an aunt who married the wrong guy.”

“He was guilty,” the MechWarrior replied evenly. “By their own standards, they were all guilty.”

_Star League Bunker, Lysidas_

_Fianna_

_Lyran Alliance_

_6 September, 3063_

General Ivan Steiner cautiously advanced his _Hauptmann_ to the crest of a hill overlooking the bunker. It looked more like a tomb than military outpost, he thought, which was probably appropriate given its history. There were no above-ground signs of the bunker, only a vaguely keyhole-shaped area of raised earth, with a rounded mound at one end, and a blunt-ended trapezoid projecting from one side. Once, it had been a chemical weapons storage facility. Fifty years ago, renegade mercenaries under the infamous bandit “Redjack” Ryan had broken in, used the weapons to hold the world hostage, then set them off anyway even after their demands had been met.

Now it was in mercenary hands again. Steiner thought he spotted movement at the bunker mouth, and sighed with impatience. Fighting between units loyal to Katherine and Victor Steiner-Davion had already flared up on dozens of worlds. He should be _there_ , rallying men to Katherine’s banner, not stuck _here_ , trying to arm-twist a group of balky, recalcitrant mercenaries into fighting for the right side. Steiner would have happily left the lot of them to rot, but Fianna was too close to the strategic BattleMech factories on Hesperus II to risk leaving them here.

Three BattleMechs detached from the shadows of the bunker and began to move towards the hill. On the taccom, Steiner heard the ’Mechs of his command company calling out ranges, models, speed, tonnage and weaponry. A bristling arsenal of lasers, particle cannon, autocannon and missile launchers locked onto the three mercenary machines.

The one in the lead interested Steiner. A _Cauldron Born_ , a Clan design, with a deadly gauss rifle in the right arm and an autocannon in the right. Maybe he’d order his men to liquidate the mercenaries regardless of the outcome of the negotiations. As far as he could see, the bunker was badly designed, with only one main entrance. Bottle that up, and they could annihilate the mercenaries at will. The salvage from that ’Mech could be used to up-gun his own, already imposing BattleMech.

“I take it you’ve come to your senses?” Steiner snapped when the mercenaries reached the foot of the hill.

“To be honest, we still do not understand your quarrel with the forces loyal to Victor Steiner-Davion,” said the mercenaries’ leader. An intense, arrogant man, Steiner thought, with the lean and hungry look of a hunter. Steiner would be glad to be rid of him.

“He has ignored his people, pursued his own vainglorious campaigns at their expense, bled the realm dry for the sake of the damn Combine.” Steiner had said the same words to so many units on so many worlds, he could almost repeat this speech in his sleep.

“Well, to be fair, at least he has not hired mercenaries to kill his own people.”

“Any man who follows a tyrant is the enemy of all free men,” Steiner declared piously. “If Victor’s lackeys oppose us, then yes, they are as guilty as he is, and we will not shirk from using any and all weapons against them.”

“A bit of a risk, I suppose. Mercenaries can be so unreliable at times. I mean, look at what happened with Redjack Ryan on this world.”

Steiner frowned down at the display on his communication screen, eyes narrowed, wondering if something was getting lost in translation. He looked suspiciously up at the _Cauldron Born_. What was the man getting at? “If you will not join us, then I will have my forces blast that bunker and your men into dust.”

“That threat would worry me more if we had not already found the bunker’s underground tunnel network and surrounded your command lance,” the other man said.

Steiner’s mouth went dry as the implication sank in. He opened his mouth to order his men to fire, as his battle computer began to scream with multiple alarms, contacts springing from the ground behind his men. The right arm of the _Cauldron Born_ twitched, lining up the gauss rifle with the _Hauptmann_ ’s head.

“Any man who follows a tyrant,” the man said. “Your words, not mine.”

Steiner saw a massive, grey blur, heading directly for his cockpit—

_Turtle Bay_

_7 May, 3067_

“Well, General Steiner probably had it coming, but I’ll admit I feel sorry for Green-Davion.”

There was an 80-ton assault ’Mech moving around to the left flank, while a bulbous 70-ton _Caesar_ lurked on the right. The final ’Mech, a medium-weight _Kintaro_ , had ducked into a crater and disappeared from his sensors, doubtless using the rubble to shield its approach. He probably had less than two minutes before it appeared behind him, and then they would attack.

“Killing a guy for something that happened 300 years ago seems a little ... excessive.”

“Is there a statute of limitations on atrocities in the Inner Sphere? You will forgive me if I am unfamiliar with your customs. Unlike you, I am quite new to this—we have so few massacres of our own. How long would you consider appropriate? Ten years? As long as a whole decade before you forget and move on? Twenty years? Fifty?”

_Tiantan_

_Sirius V_

_Free Worlds League_

_1 April, 3064_

Humanity had settled hundreds of worlds since its first great exodus from Terra. Some were garden worlds, interstellar Edens, welcoming, inviting worlds blessed with temperate climates, wide oceans and comfortable gravity. Some were harsher, unfriendly, burningly hot or frigidly cold, or else bone-dry worlds where water ice had to be chipped from ice caps or mined on distant moons. And some were simply hateful. Spiteful. Planets that wanted to kill you. Despised the weak little life forms toiling on their surfaces and did everything they could to wipe them out.

Sirius V was one of the last group. Temperatures never rose above -30 degrees Celsius, averaged around -70, and sometimes plunged as low as -120. Its atmosphere was a thick yellow-green soup of nitrogen and hydrogen, with trace amounts of methane, and its lakes and rivers were made of ammonia. Gravity held the whole poisonous mix in the crushing grip of 1.5Gs.

It really, really wanted to kill you.

From time to time, sometimes with human help, it succeeded. A cluster of five great, grey domes were buried into the rock and ice not far from the spaceport. The main habitation dome had a radius of nearly 10 kilometers, and its roof had arched over a kilometer high, with the four smaller agridomes each about half as big. The domes were shattered now, though, their jagged edges crusted with ammonia crystals, the buildings within blackened and fractured, walls twisting and peeling outwards like mortuary flowers.

Four BattleMechs moved cautiously through the wreckage, the deep green _Mad Cat_ in the lead.

“Our guy visits the most scenic places,” said Aria Bey as she picked her _Hatamoto-chi_ around a blasted skyscraper, its interior scooped out by the cataclysm that had blasted the city. “What’s the story this time?”

“Bombing,” the Bounty Hunter said shortly. “Back around ’25 or ’26, I think. Some plan by ComStar and Duke Garth of Irian to frame the Gray Death Legion and seize their holdings on Helm.”

Aria whistled, low and slow. “Baby Blake in a blue bathtub, all this just to kick a bunch of mercs off a landholding?”

“Look around the galaxy, Bey,” the _Kintaro_ pilot, Zack Kolbe, chimed in. “Keeping things in perspective ain’t really the Houses’ strong suit.”

“Which explains why Colonel Novak Bryce-Marik accepted a challenge to a duel from some nobody mercenary in the middle of freezing nowhere,” concluded the Bounty Hunter. “The Colonel was at Princefield Academy. I don’t think you’re allowed to graduate until you’ve killed three of your classmates over matters of honor.”

“Think I got him,” said Aria. “Patching it through.” She flicked two switches on her comm panel, sharing the video feed of her sensors with the rest of the lance.

A 100-ton _Grand Titan_ lay on its front in the middle of an open plaza. A neat, round hole had been punched in the war machine’s back, the armor at the edges bent inwards, indicating it had been hit from behind. The rear of the head unit, containing the cockpit, was pitted and scarred in dozens of places, some of them rounded divots where shot had impacted and been absorbed, others stygian black holes where they had penetrated. Aria shuddered. If Bryce-Marik hadn’t asphyxiated when the air escaped the cockpit, the cold would have killed him just as sure. Neither was a great way to die.

“Yeah, that’s the Colonel’s BattleMech,” the Bounty Hunter agreed. “Looks like it took a gauss slug to the back, then LB autocannon frag rounds to the head.”

“Stabbed in the back,” Aria muttered. “Betrayed. Just like the people here.”

“Think it’s the same guy?” wondered Zack.

“Almost undoubtedly,” the Bounty Hunter mused. “The MO is slightly different, but the circumstances are pretty similar. Aristocrat with a big name, mega-death scenery in the background, cause of death tailored to the nature of said atrocity.”

“What’s he got against aristos?” Zack asked.

“Maybe he just has a thing about hyphens,” offered Aria.

“Not just any aristos,” the Bounty Hunter corrected. “Jordan, Green-Davion, Steiner, Bryce-Marik. I think somebody wants to send the Houses a message.”

_Turtle Bay_

_7 May, 3067_

“Atrocities, war crimes and massacres, that’s what got you so upset? Whatever the message is, you’re wasting your breath there, Clanner,” the Bounty Hunter said. “Ain’t nobody listening.”

“And which clan do you think I am from?”

“Well, you’re here. Which I bet means you’re Smoke Jaguar.”

“And where is Clan Smoke Jaguar now?”

“Gone. We crushed you. Wiped you out. A task force from the Inner Sphere went to your homeworld and kicked your collective asses into oblivion.”

“Precisely. Because we were so _violent_ ,” the sarcasm dripped across the channel like poison, like acid. “So _inhuman_ and _bestial_. Look what we did to poor Edo City. Why, we murdered over a _million_. So you see, the genocide was quite justified. After all, unlike you, we were such _monsters_.”

_Kentares Memorial_

_Kentares IV_

_Federated Commonwealth_

_30 August, 3064_

A line of gold warmed the horizon, diffused into tangerine and pink as it touched the clear sky in a teasing prelude to sunrise. A circle of conical evergreen pines were burnished in the first rays of light, green needles become brass, living statues about a memorial to the dead.

In the center of the circle there was a great raised dais, inscribed with ochre, onyx and gold leaf in the shape of a starburst, pierced with the long blade of a sword. At the center of the starburst rose a pale, marble statue of a knight locked in combat with a writhing, scaled serpent. The knight’s lance pierced its breast, and the dragon’s head was thrown back in agony. In the morning light the marble glowed, and the lance was transformed into a line of fire.

Armin Veil paused at the edge of the circle of trees and took a deep breath, filled his lungs with the resin-y, almost sweet pine tree scent, warming his old and tired bones in the fresh, clear light. He was a groundskeeper in the Kentares Memorial Park, a monument to the 52 million slaughtered by the Combine’s Coordinator Jinjiro Kurita after his father had died on the planet.

A solemn duty, but one Armin was proud of.

The park would open in an hour, bringing the crowds. People brought their families here now. On holidays children ran shrieking and laughing about the monument. Teenagers posed for holos or, hands in awkward pockets, chins tucked against shy chests, courted one another with sidelong, smoldering glances. Tourists stood in silence for long, solemn minutes and then stomped off in search of the gift shop. But Armin did not mind. The dead would understand, he felt, might be happy that the life had recovered enough for laugher, for teenage courting, for souvenirs.

Armin began to sweep the dust and needles from the path that circled about the edge of the monument, when he stopped, watery eyes squinting. There were two figures on the path ahead, directly in front of the dedication plaque. One standing, the other bowed over, as though in prayer, or else asleep. Backlit by the rising sun, it was hard to make out their features.

“Hey,” Armin called, “we’re not open yet! How’d you get in here?”

The standing figure seemed to look his way, then reached to its waist, and drew something—flickering, shining in the sunlight. Armin frowned, shouldered his broom, and stomped angrily forward. “I said—” he began, and then his jaw hung open, speechless, incapable of making any sound.

The figure on the ground was wearing the white dress uniform of a Draconis Combine officer. His hands were bound behind his back with something clear and plastic, while his mouth was gagged. The man standing over him wore grey and red. In his hands, he held a sword. With a sudden, swift, decisive stroke, the blade leaped up, burning bright with the dawn, then slashed down upon the kneeling man’s neck.

Blood fountained, splattered across the path and the plaque. The body slumped sideways. Armin fell to his knees.

The grey figure moved towards him. Panther-graceful, silent, the man’s eyes never moving from Armin’s face. Blood dripped from the tip of the blade upon the path.

“How ... how dare you,” Armin found his voice at last as the man approached. “You foul, vicious, subhuman ...”

“Why are you so upset?” The man smiled, a slow, lazy and confident thing. He came to a stop a meter from Armin. Within easy sword’s reach. “He was a Kurita. Not just someone from the Combine, mind you, but a member of the Kurita family. I thought hating them was what this place was all about.”

“No. No, not that. This is about remembering history, remembering the victims, not vengeance,” Armin said. “This is a place of peace, a place of healing.”

“Is it?”

The blade rose and Armin closed his eyes, waiting to die. When nothing happened, Armin opened them a crack, and saw the tip of the sword now pointed towards the statue at the center of the monument.

“Is that what the knight is doing?” the grey man asked. “Killing the dragon with kindness? Healing it with a lance to the chest?”

“We’ve made our peace with the Combine,” Armin said stubbornly. “At least they’re human like us. Better them than the Clans—”

The man threw back his head and laughed. It was a cold and harsh, whipping, scarring sound. He threw the sword on the path before Armin. “That’s right, House Kurita is nothing like the Clans,” he said, brushing past Armin without looking back. “They’re just like you.”

_Turtle Bay_

_7 May, 3067_

“So you killed someone from each of the great Houses on the site of one of their atrocities, then led us back here, all as if to say, what? ‘Look, we Smoke Jaguars weren’t as bad as the rest of you, we only killed a million?’ You have any idea how sick that sounds?”

“As sick as saying my people deserved to be wiped out for it, while you let yourselves go unpunished.”

“Ever stop and think maybe killing five guys just to make a point is exactly the kind of thing that got your people in trouble in the first place? There comes a time when you’ve just got to—you know—stop.”

‘Stop’—that would be the signal. The Smoke Jaguar MechWarrior heaved his ’Mech to the side as particle bolts, laser beams and salvos of missiles all converged on him. He spun, found the _Kintaro_ barely 90 meters away. He fired everything, lasers, missiles and cluster rounds making the _Kintaro_ jerk as though electrified, before he put a gauss round through the ’Mech’s head.

As smoke belched from the neck and the _Kintaro_ fell backwards, he swung back, dodged around the splinter of building. His enemies’ weapons tracked, adjusted, battering his ’Mech, tracing glowing lines of melted and twisted armor. He targeted the _Caesar_ next, staggered it with a hit to the hip, then another to the shoulder. The _Caesar_ reeled backwards, its foot slipped on loose rubble, pitching it onto its side, sliding head-first into a crater. The _Ebon Jaguar_ moved in for the kill, only to stagger under another fusillade of laser and particle fire.

The _Timber Wolf_ stalked forward, incandescent beams blazing from its arms with deadly accuracy.

A power relay in the _Ebon Jaguar_ ’s right shoulder detonated, sending the arm assembling spinning away, crashing against a ruined wall. Both launchers were out, the knee on one leg fused stiff, the ankle on the other melted to slag. Gritting his teeth, the MechWarrior lumbered around, firing as fast as his weapons could cycle.

White light washed across the viewscreen. When it cleared, his cockpit was staring up at the sky. The shadow of the Timber Wolf blotted out the sun. The weapons pods in its arms aimed down.

“Looks like this is the end of your little crusade, stranger,” said the Bounty Hunter.

“My name is Axel Showers,” he replied defiantly. “I am not afraid to die.”

“Who said anything about dying?” came the response. “You’ve proven you know how to track and take down a target. That’s a skill I can use and thanks to you, I’m now short a man. Time you stopped working pro bono, Mister Showers.”


End file.
